Guernsey · Living standards
Poverty, housing, food and loneliness.
Four of these five are measured by the States itself, in reports that are published and then rarely read together. The fifth, food-bank usage, is a genuine gap, and this page says so rather than filling it with numbers that do not belong in the same column.
- Below 60% of median income after housing costs, 2022
- 18.9%Below 60% of median income after housing costs, 2022
- The 60%-of-median threshold, 2022
- £22,318The 60%-of-median threshold, 2022
- Food insecure at some point in six months, 2023
- 13.9%Food insecure at some point in six months, 2023
- Without secure housing, 2023
- 1.9%Without secure housing, 2023
Measured annually since 2014
Relative poverty
The share of the population living below 60% of median equivalised income after housing costs, and the same share once those receiving supplementary benefit or income support are excluded.
Below 60% of median income after housing costs, 2014 to 2022
Read the whole run, not the recent movement. 2019’s 16.5% is the lowest reading in the series, so quoting the 2022 figure as “up from 16.5%” is cherry-picking. That comparison is arithmetically true, a rise of 2.4 points, and it still misleads, because it measures from the best year Guernsey has recorded rather than from anywhere typical. Set against 2014, where the series begins, 2022’s 18.9% is 3.4 points lower, not higher.
The second line is the same measure with recipients of supplementary benefit or income support removed. It sits consistently below the headline, and the distance between the two lines is what the benefit system is doing. In 2022 the 60%-of-median threshold was £22,318.
States of Guernsey, Guernsey Indicators of Poverty Report. Measured after housing costs, social security and tax, and equivalised for household size. This is designated an annual publication and the States’ own 2026 publication calendar names the next edition, the Annual Indicators of Poverty Report 2024. That edition currently sits on the calendar’s undated list, with no announced publication date, so the run stops at 2022 until it appears. Nine annual points, 2014 to 2022. The Jersey points are the same measure on the same definition — below 60% of median equivalised income, after housing costs — from the States of Jersey Income Distribution Survey, which runs roughly five-yearly rather than annually. They are plotted as discrete waves, each at its first calendar year, and are deliberately not joined into a line: Jersey publishes no reading for the years in between, and the wave before this window (2009/10, 21%) falls outside it. Income Distribution Survey; Homelessness in Jersey, quarterly report; Jersey Opinions and Lifestyle Survey.
A measure that does exist
Housing insecurity
Guernsey is often said to have no homelessness statistic. It has one. The States built an official measure of the population without secure housing in response to the Guernsey Community Foundation's 2022 homelessness report, and has published it back to 2016.
Population without secure housing, 2016 to 2023
From 1.2% in 2016 to 1.9% in 2023. The shaded band marks 2020, when visitor accommodation was pressed into housing use during the pandemic. That changed what the measure counts, so the points either side of the band are not strictly like-for-like and the eight years should not be read as one uninterrupted run.
Social rented and partial ownership waiting list, households at 31 December
- 2019
- 264
- 2020
- 300
- 2023
- 354
- 2024
- 384
264 households in 2019, 384 in 2024. New applicants in a single year rose from 115 in 2019 to 263 in 2024, 148 more people joining the queue in a year than five years earlier. Only post-merger readings are shown. A methodology change in October 2018 combined the States and Guernsey Housing Association lists, so anything earlier is not like-for-like.
2,662 units
Affordable housing stock in 2025, 9.6% of all housing on the island. No net additional affordable units were created during 2025, and the stock has been flat since 2022, so the queue above grew against a stock that did not.
Secure housing: States of Guernsey. The measure exists because the Guernsey Community Foundation’s 2022 homelessness report argued the island could not manage what it did not count, and it is the answer to that. Waiting list: social rented and partial ownership applicants recorded at 31 December each year, post-2018-merger readings only.
New in the 2023 survey wave
Food insecurity
The Guernsey and Alderney Wellbeing Survey 2023 carried the standard Food Foundation three-item instrument for the first time, which makes the island's figure internationally comparable but leaves it with no history of its own.
13.9%
Experienced food insecurity at some point in the previous six months, 2023.
5.7%
In the previous month alone. Roughly two in five of the six-month group, so this is a recurring condition for a substantial share of them rather than a single bad week.
The three items, previous six months, 2023
- Ate smaller meals or skipped meals12.6%
- Were hungry but did not eat8.9%
- Did not eat for a whole day3.5%
The items are nested by severity, from eating less to not eating at all for a day. Bars are scaled to the largest of the three, not to 100%.
Who reports it, 2023
- Aged 25–3427.9%
- Households with children23.0%
- In affordable housing19.0%
- In private rental17.1%
- Households without children10.9%
- Aged 75+2.9%
- Owner-occupiers2.2%
The gradient runs by age, by tenure and by whether there are children in the household. Owner-occupiers and the over-75s sit at the bottom of every cut of this measure.
One item has a genuine 2018 comparator, and it more than doubled. The share saying they had skipped meals went from 5.5% in 2018 to 12.4% in 2023, a rise of 6.9 points. That single line is the only part of this section with a before and an after.
Everything else here is a first reading. 2023 is the first wave to carry the module, so there is no back-series and nothing to compare against. The Wellbeing Survey runs on a roughly five-yearly cycle, which means the earliest possible second data point for the full instrument arrives around 2030. Any claim that food insecurity in Guernsey is rising or falling, made before then, is not resting on this measure.
Guernsey and Alderney Wellbeing Survey 2023, section 5.4. The three-item instrument is the Food Foundation’s, which is what makes the headline internationally comparable. The survey report describes the 2023 wave as allowing food insecurity to be considered for the first time.
The one genuine gap
Food-bank usage
There is no chart here, and that is the finding. No official statistic exists, the operating charity publishes no series of its own, and the figures that do circulate arrive through a funder's annual review or the local press in units that cannot be put on the same axis.
714
households supported
2025
Lloyds Bank Foundation CI annual review
68
families a week, on average
2025
Lloyds Bank Foundation CI annual review
~3,500
visits to the centre
2025
Lloyds Bank Foundation CI annual review
3,190
requests for help, against 2,474 in 2022
2023
Guernsey Welfare Service, via local press
These four figures must not be chained into a series. They are counted in four incompatible units. Households supported, families a week, visits to the centre and requests for help each answer a different question. A weekly average and an annual household count cannot be plotted on the same axis, and the weekly averages that circulate locally rest on contested base years drawn from different sources. Placing them end to end produces a trend line that no one measured.
Every one of them understates need by construction. The service caps users at one visit a month. Throughput is therefore bounded by the cap rather than by demand, so a flat or falling visit count is compatible with rising need, and cannot be read as evidence against it.
What would close the gap is a single published series on one basis, at a stated frequency, from either the charity or the States. Until that exists, these figures are usable individually, with their date and their source attached, and not otherwise.
Two comparable waves, 2018 and 2023
Loneliness
Measured on the De Jong Gierveld scale in the Wellbeing Survey. The instrument was not carried in 2013, so 2018 and 2023 are the only two waves that can be compared.
| Measure | 2018 | 2023 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lonely often or all the timeSignificant | 18.6% | 16.9% | -1.7 pts |
| Scoring 5–6 on the 0–6 scale | 19.1% | 21.7% | +2.6 pts |
| Intensely emotionally lonely | 15.4% | 15.5% | +0.1 pts |
| Intensely socially lonely | 31.5% | 34.9% | +3.4 pts |
| Intensely socially lonely, aged 75+ | 16.9% | 27.5% | +10.6 pts |
The headline and the sub-scales point in opposite directions. The share reporting they are lonely often or all the time fell from 18.6% to 16.9%, and the report itself treats that fall as statistically significant. Reported on its own it reads as an improvement. Every other line in the table moved the other way. The share scoring 5 or 6 on the 0 to 6 scale rose, intense social loneliness rose, and among the over-75s intense social loneliness rose 10.6 points, from 16.9% to 27.5%.
Both things are true at once. Fewer people describe themselves as lonely, and more people score as intensely lonely on the instrument that does not ask them to self-describe. Quoting the headline without the sub-scales would be straightforwardly misleading, which is why both are carried here.
28.1%
Intensely emotionally lonely, aged 16 to 24, 2023.
5.0%
Intensely emotionally lonely, aged 75 and over, 2023.
The age gradient inverts depending on which kind of loneliness is being measured. Emotional loneliness, the absence of a close attachment, is concentrated among the youngest adults. Social loneliness, the absence of a wider network, is concentrated among the oldest. A policy response built for one of them will miss the other, and an average across both hides the fact that they are different problems in different households.
Guernsey and Alderney Wellbeing Survey 2023, De Jong Gierveld loneliness scale. Two comparable waves only. The instrument was not carried in the 2013 survey, so there is no earlier point. “Significant” marks a change the report itself reports as statistically significant.
Sources for this page: Guernsey Indicators of Poverty Report; Guernsey & Alderney Wellbeing Survey 2023; Guernsey Household Expenditure Survey 2023–24; Guernsey Welfare Service. Each figure is dated by the period it measures. Where a measure has a methodology break or a single reading only, that is stated beside it rather than smoothed over.
Infrastructure
Telecoms mast approvals
How many mobile phone mast planning applications have been approved in Guernsey since 2020, and by which operator - derived from a Freedom of Information response listing every application individually.
Mast approvals by year, 2020–2025
13 approved applications in total - but not 13 distinct masts: one of 2023’s six is a variation to an approval granted earlier the same year at the same site, so these cover 12 distinct proposals, several of them replacements of existing masts rather than new sites. 2025 covers only the period to 28 March 2025, the date of the FOI response - not a full year.
By operator
- Sure Guernsey11
- JT Guernsey2
“Sure Guernsey Ltd” and “Sure Guernsey Limited” are merged here as the same operator, as named variously in the source.